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Steam Tags: Break out the popcorn

“So let’s empower players and get them in on categorizing games and giving one- and two-word feedback to developers!”

Oh man, how badly did that Valve meeting have to go that Steam Tags got out of the door? I do not care for Valve one way or the other, but this has got to be one of the worst ideas I’ve seen in the games industry. You don’t just give players the tools to grief games and studios directly while screwing with their fellow gamers. You don’t unless you do not care about the stupidsplosion that will follow.

It’s good to know that Valve has a witty comeback to studios concerned that their games are being slapped with holocaust and racist tags: “Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers. Often this is simply because there is some piece of information regarding the game that customers feel is missing from the store page.”

here’s my problem with this and most of internet social interaction in general. I don’t disagree that this wasn’t well thought out, but why is everyone blaming steam/valve for allowing the system and naively trusting people to use it appropriately when the truth is we should be disgusted by the people abusing the systems behavior. No one speaks out against the Trolls on forums, we joke about how terrible Barrens chat is in WoW, we blame it on F2P and it giving access to chat for younger kids, but noone ever blames those people or holds them up as examples of whats wrong….nope we blame the game, the developer, the chat program it happens on.

Its said that we accept this behavior cause it happens on the internet even though we would never accept it from a colleague or co-worker or a stranger out in public.

Sure Valve needs to pull the plug on this, but not because it couldn’t have been a helpful tool but because the internet is mostly full of tools.

“It would have been great if everyone wasn’t horrible” may be true, but also pointless. That’s like saying “This building would have been great if it weren’t in an earthquake zone”. A tool that fails to account for the environment or participants is not a good tool.